LDS video: what is upstreaming?

LDS video: what is upstreaming?

I brought my HD camcorder at the Linaro Developer Summit in Budapest last month, and I managed to videotape an interesting talk from Lee Jones (ST-Ericsson Landing Team Lead).

This talk was plenty of good advice, not only for Linaro kernel engineers but also for anyone who wishes to contribute to the Linux kernel, in particular on the ARM platform. Remember that Linaro is only about getting new features into mainstream projects (Linux kernel, compiling toolchains, C libraries…). We know that any piece of code that doesn’t make its way into mainline will sooner or later bitrot in oblivion, even with the best intentions and efforts to maintain it.

By watching the video or reading the slides, you will learn about:

The complexity of the maintainer hierarchy

Benefits of upstreaming

How to do things right as early as possible

How to write coding style compliant code

How to create, review and submit patches

Patience and how to deal with mailing lists

How long the upstreaming process can take

We also had the pleasure to have famous kernel contributors in the room: Thomas Gleixner and Grant Likely, who now work for Linaro (see our MeetTheTeam wiki page for details), and added insightful comments.